


No One Mourns the Wicked

by cacophonyGilded



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Episode Rewrite: s05e07 Ace Chemicals, Loosely Adapts Elements of Batman: The Killing Joke, M/M, Minor Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne, POV Second Person, Russian Roulette, Sexually Charged Fistfights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 09:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18150167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cacophonyGilded/pseuds/cacophonyGilded
Summary: In the aftermath of their fight at Ace Chemicals, Bruce Wayne tells his allies the story of Jeremiah Valeska's fall from grace; the story of a few quick punches and a faulty guard rail.(He lies.)





	No One Mourns the Wicked

**Author's Note:**

> basically i'm asserting that the events we see leading up to jeremiah's fall in 5x07 are a cover story cooked up by bruce, who for his own reasons wanted to keep the true events to himself. if you think that this sounds like me being butthurt about not getting as much batjokes/wayleska content as i had anticipated, that's because i totally am, and i can own that. happy reading!

When Jeremiah Valeska falls into the acid, it means nothing to you.

He means  _ nothing _ to you. There are no words to describe the nauseating cocktail of apathy and repulse that he elicits in you--to call him a fiend, a madman, to say that the world will be a better place when he’s dead and gone--any of these would be to misrepresent the truth of the matter, to  _ grossly diminish _ the cavernous depths of your disgust. Jeremiah blew the bridges to the mainland. Jeremiah forced Jim’s hand, and it’s because of him that by tomorrow morning, the river around Gotham City will be a poisonous cesspool that takes untold hundreds of lives on top of the thousands he’s already accountable for. Jeremiah is the sole reason that Gotham is in its current predicament; he is responsible for so much death, and chaos, and anarchy, for the destruction of so many homes and the creation of so much goddamn  _ pain  _ that you still cannot fathom the full extent of his blow. Jeremiah has put off reunification for additional months, if not years, with his actions tonight alone. You do not believe it is possible for a human being to be evil, purely evil, but you think that Jeremiah has made an art out of getting pretty damn close, and so, you feel nothing for him. You will not even give him the satisfaction of your hate.

 

Selina saves the day; that’s what you’ll tell them. She was there when your parents died, and she is there, miraculously, when Jeremiah stages his reenactment of the same. In the Siren’s club, a sparse week or so ago, she told you that she stood by while your parents died--that she did  _ nothing. _ You tried to tell her then that there was nothing she could have done, and that was true. 

You should have known better, though. 

You were right that day when you told her you knew her, which means you knew that, though she had killed before and probably would again if she were pushed there, her supposed murder of Jeremiah (and not only that--the trauma building up to it, too: the paralysis and the suicide attempt and everything bad Jeremiah, Gotham, the world, and _you_ had thrown at her at once) was affecting her more than she wanted you to know, and that it was absolutely the wrong time, wrong place, wrong _way_ to ask her to absolve herself of her sins, of any sins, even those not rightfully hers to claim. This inward implacability is a way in which the two of you are the same, anyhow; sometimes you think on what Gotham has become and what it made you--recalling in vivid technicolor your parents dead in their own blood, the conspiracy around your life and company, your kidnapping at the hands of the Order of St. Dumas and the sequel courtesy the Court, the appearance of Ra’s al Ghul, the insanity of Jeremiah Valeska, Gotham becoming a No Man’s Land--and in a way, you blame yourself for all of it. Something inside you, something very important and very _loud,_ tells you that none of what happened to Gotham would have happened if Thomas and Martha Wayne were still alive. There would still be corruption, of course, and rot just beneath the surface--dozens upon dozens of ugly, writhing creatures clinging to the city’s seedy underbelly--but before your parents were gone, things had been balanced, however precariously. They’d been balanced, and that gave people hope. _Stability._

If you had done something that night, had disarmed Matches Malone and defied the Court of Owls in one fell swoop, you could have saved them. More than that, you could have saved Gotham.  _ Ha. _ But it was as you told Selina; there was nothing you could have done. You were just a scared kid, and however much she didn’t want to admit it, she was, too.

You hadn’t been there when she needed you, at the bar. Not in the way that mattered. But when it matters, when it truly matters,  _ she _ is there for  _ you. _ No matter how much Selina Kyle claims to be above it all, to not give a shit about you, or the city, or hell, even Jim Gordon, she is there, this time, to stop the shooter’s hand.

There are so many things you need to say to her. Jeremiah has escaped, though, and so you turn your back on these tumultuous emotions in favor of breaking out into a hard run in a direction that takes you generally toward him and directly away from her. You do not take time to consider this for the elaborate avoidance technique that it is; instead, you seal your fate by chasing Jeremiah into the factory marked “Ace Chemicals,” and you obstinately do no thinking whatsoever. 

On the gangplank above the bubbling acid, Jeremiah’s head start finally gives out on him, and once you’ve caught him, he’s easy enough to overpower and disarm. In the scuffle, his knife makes the fall that foreshadows his own. 

He demands that you acknowledge the connection between the two of you, but there is nothing. You fight, but without the knife acting to his advantage, pinning him down is almost laughably easy--you do not even break a sweat. You similarly do not let yourself consider that there might be another reason he lets you punch him without so much as raising a hand in his own defense, and neither do you look into his eyes and understand that it is not hate you find there. You do not see his affection. You do not comprehend his love. No, no. You don’t do that at all.

He stands up to take another blow, and clutches at you like you are every one of his final threads of sanity. You suppose that’s appropriate. He tells you that there’s no  _ you _ without  _ him, _ and that’s--laughable. You have been yourself, on the track to becoming what you are and will be, since the night your parents were shot, the one he could never truly hope to recreate. Gotham made you what you are, and he has nearly destroyed it. There is a you without him. You do not need Jeremiah Valeska.

While he is pushing you back against the broken railing above the vat, it does not occur to you that there may be a you without him, but there is no  _ him _ without  _ you. _ You do not remember that you were the one who took less than ten seconds to read him in that room with Jim and Lucius and who, with strategically placed touches and meticulously kind words, manipulated him into allowing a bomb to be cuffed around his neck for the good of your city. You do not consider that he went crazy because of your critical failure to protect him as you should’ve, or because you never killed his brother, however many times you had the opportunity, means, and  _ motive _ to do so. You do not dwell on the fact that none of this--none of this--would have happened if you had just played his game and been his friend from the start. No, you don’t.

All you do, your back to the railing, is make it known how little he means to you. How little power, how little sway he has. Then he hits you, or tries, at least, and it’s clumsy. You dodge. He falls. 

You let him.

And when Jeremiah Valeska falls into the acid, it means nothing to you at all.

This is the story you tell the others--Jim and Selina first, but Jim’s backup calvary and Alfred show up on the scene just in time to be late, too--when they find you on the gangplank, still frozen in spot (though you cannot say whether this is from horror or regret or something else entirely), still looking down where Jeremiah once was. Later, you will furnish them with a full report, an account that starts with seeing a woman who was not your mother walk down into a tunnel and ends with that ill-advised, off balanced swing at you that cost Jeremiah everything. If you edit the story a little, censor your reactions to make yourself seem the stoic you were once told your father was, change some of Jeremiah’s anguished declarations to seem a little more brotherly, a little more  _ friendly... _ well. Nobody seems to mind.

When someone pulls Jeremiah from the acid, his body in a state of damage not dissimilar to the state of the aquatic wildlife that will begin washing up on Gotham’s shores less than hours after Jim drives that truck into the river, you are quite sure you have nothing to do with it, thank you. Why would you? You are content, after all, to leave him there. Let him drown in the mess he’s caused. It’s Jim, ever-heroic James Gordon, who decides that whatever Jeremiah did, the people deserve to see justice done, and this sick man does not have to die today. 

Jim saves him. You do nothing. 

You feel nothing.

At least, that--all of that--is what you tell them after the fact. It’s not a happy story (there’s no songs, no cheering, because  _ the Witch of the West is dead _ is a little less fun when everyone already toasted their celebratory champagne to it weeks ago, and in this case, it’s not even true), but it’s a good one, you think. Jim and Selina make good heroes. You did what you had to do. No one mourns the body in the tank and then, because of Jim’s righteous spirit, there’s nothing left there to mourn, anyway. He’s a good man, Jim Gordon. You know he likes the story you tell.

You wish it were true.

  
  


It’s not that you’re a liar, not really. At least, you’d prefer not to think so.

You’re just…  _ pragmatic. _ The story you tell is not complete fabrication; its early chapters--Wayne manor, the tunnel, practically everything right up to your confrontation in Crime Alley--you tell nearly without censor, but for a few words (“lover” replaced with “best friend” and then “brother,” for instance; you have not at any point in the duration of your acquaintance been unaware of the nature of Jeremiah’s misplaced feelings for you, but it seems pressingly important, for reasons that you don’t want to examine too closely, that you keep that one little detail out of your account). It only makes sense to do things that way. Alfred, Selina, Jim, and Lee--all of them had been around at one point or another during those parts, and if you deviate far from their own memories of the events, it will raise eyebrows, surely. The word exchange you indulge, and if anyone notices, you watch them rationalize it just as quickly--probably through the mental construction of some other trauma, too terrible to speak aloud, that they fit snugly into the quieter bits of your story.

You let them think what they like.

The gratefulness beyond words you feel for Selina, your admiration of Jim for his heroism--these, too, are genuine. They  _ are _ heroes, true heroes, heroes of the type which only exist in storybooks and children’s comics. You used to think that you were one too, in a way; a new breed of hero of your own creation, a being born from Gotham City which would be its only hope at salvation.

Jury’s out on that.

The one place your story truly deviates from the one you spin for Jim and the others is on the gangplank in Ace Chemicals. You pin Jeremiah down, hit him, hit him again; that much, you recount. What you don’t tell them, when it comes time to tell, what you find too  _ shameful _ to tell them, is that your brutality is not meant to subdue (he isn’t moving--actually, he’s holding your thigh in a grip that leaves bruises in an effort to  _ keep you close), _ but rather, to hurt him, to take your anger out on him, because he’s there, and he’s letting you. It doesn’t matter in that moment that this is the man who did his best to destroy your city, who was more successful than any villain you’ve known to date in destroying lives,  _ civilian _ lives, the lives of people you once knew. None of that matters. It might be anyone under you in that moment--you would hit them just the same.

What stops you isn’t justice, either. It’s not morals, it’s not even simple muscle exhaustion. You stop hitting Jeremiah Valeska because you catch his eyes as he begs you to admit that you feel the connection between the two of you… and for just one second, you do.

It scares you. It scares you in a way that you are not yet articulate enough to explain. When you see his eyes, wild and pleading and most definitely  _ crazy, _ you understand a few things at once. First: he will let you hit him as many times as you want to, if that’s what it takes to be near you. In addition, he does not want to hurt you, but he’d hit you back in a heartbeat if you were to make him think that’s what you want (and why do you get the sinking feeling that it is?). He will, quite literally, take anything he can get. 

Second: he’s scared, but not of you. For a moment, your mind flashes back to  _ before, _ back when he had been a prodigious engineer who worked closely with your father, and who hid himself deep underground in a world of his own creation because he feared what was in the world above, the world that was constantly encroaching in the form of a nightmare bearing his own face. You’d been the one to draw Jeremiah out then, hadn’t you? You made him face his fears, and look where it left the city. Look where it left him.

A fear like that is in his eyes now--but it isn't of Jerome, or of the world. It’s of the world  _ without you. _ You can’t explain how you know, but you do, intrinsically. Innately. He’s looking at you, and the fear in his eyes is the fear that you will pull away, the dawning realization that his plan, his  _ stupid, evil _ plan, had been the wrong way to get what he wanted, and that you will be unreachable as a result. When this understanding dawns on  _ you, _ you feel that uncertainty, that small sliver of the bygone Jeremiah you met in the maze (the soft, kind Jeremiah, the Jeremiah you might have… well), in every point of contact between you and him, every tense muscle of his that you have pinned underneath your own. Part of you (a deep, hidden part that still impossibly holds out some naive hope for this ruin of a man and his redemption) wants to read remorse into the way he’s conditioning himself to go limp as you throw around your anger, to feel some twisted, devoted desperation in the hand that’s still anchoring him to your thigh. 

The effort not to read anything into or assume anything about his actions, to not set yourself up for a fall that will break you, makes you _ ache. _

The third thing that looking into Jeremiah’s eyes makes you understand is that he is in love with you. You’ve known that, of course. He hasn’t been subtle in the least, nor trying to hide it--but somehow, until this moment, the knowledge had never quite managed to permeate the walls you put up to keep it out, had never quite manifested in the concrete. You never understood the scope, the sincerity of his love; easier to play it off as an obsessive delusion built around the one person who had ever spoken kindly to him. Now, though--you couldn’t miss it now even if you  _ wanted _ to (and you do, oh, yes, you do). It might as well be spelled out on a neon billboard hung in downtown Gotham, flanked by blinking marquee lights and balloons and fucking confetti: he’s in  _ love _ with you.

That’s the connection he’s demanding you feel; that’s the source of his intense attachment to you, of the  _ need _ his demands reflect. Every thought in Jeremiah’s head is polluted by mania, corrupted beyond recognition by whatever it was Jerome left him as a parting gift (or perhaps by whatever genetics they shared before that, or by some third factor that has nothing to do with Jerome or the rest of the Valeska clan, and has everything to do with Jeremiah himself), and you can see in his eyes how everything down to his smallest unformed  _ feeling _ comes out muddied by the same… but not that. That love, that connection he’s been trying desperately to share with you, that’s  _ clear as day. _ Something deep within him--perhaps the Jeremiah he’d been before you forcibly exposed him to Gotham’s toxic atmosphere--is pleading for you to understand.

And you do.

For one second, just one, you feel as though you have been cursed with an overwhelming, omniscient vision. Decades worth of association with this man are imprinted on your brain in one excruciating  _ moment,  _ and there you are, powerless to stop it, unable to unsee it. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before--the crushing weight of being  _ knownloveddesired _ presses down on you all at once, so heavy you have to strain under it lest it break you, and you flail. There is nothing else left.

It felt monumentally important before, but in the scope of all you see (all you’re forced to take in against your desperate struggles to  _ keep out), _ this singular fight becomes nothing but a quick step in the waltz you and Jeremiah have been dancing for far longer than the relatively brief span of your association to date. It’s a dance you’ve been dancing (a simple one-two-three, one-two-three where each count is something gruesomely horrible; one, Jeremiah kidnaps Alfred and rigs your house with bombs, two, Jeremiah makes two innocent people into nightmarish copies of your parents just to kill them in front of you, three, Jeremiah does his damndest to send missiles into the air, intent on poisoning what’s left of Gotham City the way it poisoned him) since the beginning, but even worse, it’s one you’ll  _ be _ dancing long into the future, a dance that--if something doesn’t change, and soon--might very well kill the both of you. You and Jeremiah are hurtling toward an end in which you fall down together, pulled by the very weight of each other’s exhaustion, and do not get back up. Already, you feel the threads of that pull binding you to something vast and inevitable--some great destiny that you share with Jeremiah and which neither of you can escape--but right now, in this moment, there is a more immediate pull, an angry and unrelenting force you can’t ignore. You feel pulled  _ to him, _ pulled forward, really, and it’s so much, so overwhelming--

You stop hitting Jeremiah Valeska. For a moment, you just sit there, panting, looking at him with eyes like a deer in the headlights. Your cocked fist pauses in mid air, then drops. He looks back at you. When it becomes clear that you’ve stopped, that you aren’t planning to resume hitting him right when he thinks you’ve given up and shown mercy, he pushes himself up on one arm, grabbing the front of your coat with the other. His eyes are wild and feral as he crushes you nearer to him, his forehead nearly resting against your own.

“Tell me you feel it,” he says again, only this time it is not so much demanding as it is pleading, voice tinged with a noise that is both desperate and raw. You dislike this noise. “The connection between us.”

You don’t know what to say. You cannot tell him the truth.

“You…” You pause for a beat too long, exhale shakily. “...mean nothing to me.”

Remembering yourself, you pull away from his grip then, forcing your tired legs to support you so that you can regain a healthy degree of distance and move yourself out of the straddle you’d taken about his hips (this development feeling incredibly important suddenly, for no reason in particular). As you rise, you feel his fingers dig into your thigh where they grasp desperately for purchase, leaving angry little red lines you won’t so much as notice in a few hours, when you are cataloging the extent of your injuries, but which you notice right then, anyway. They sting. When Jeremiah stands himself, automatically (mechanically) chasing your warmth, he looks betrayed, like he might cry--and then he doesn’t. 

As you look on, it seems Jeremiah has finally remembered how to be angry with you. 

“No.” 

As he says it, he swings at you hard, and though you are stronger than him and faster than him, the hit happens to land. It also happens to hurt like a bitch. 

You stumble backward.

“No!” 

Another hit. Dazed from the first blow, which connected with your ear and sent your equilibrium spinning out of whack, you take the full force of the second in your stomach, and for a moment, just a moment, you very seriously contemplate throwing up. Trying to regain the ground you’ve lost on the gangplank--he’s forcing you backward with more success than you’d like, and it seems important you stay up here, both because you stand a better chance in the fight if you’re on even ground and for some other, heavier reason you can’t explain, except by saying it feels cosmically significant that you fight Jeremiah exactly where you are now (a significance you have a sinking feeling that Jeremiah understands as well--after all, he was the one who led you up here in the first place, wasn’t he?)--you throw a hardwon punch of your own.

It neatly and cleanly splits his top lip and sends him jerking backward and away from you. As you watch him stumble, it occurs to you that you may have fucked up; once you see the sight of the destruction you wrought, you immediately wish you hadn’t. His face drips with blood, redder than the lipstick you’ve ruined, and you’re--huh. You’re distracted, at any rate, long enough for Jeremiah to get in a final “NO!” coupled with a final headshot that knocks you clumsily down against the broken railing: the railing, which screams and bends in objection to supporting your weight. He’s on you again in a second, wrenching both hands into the lapels of your coat and searching your face for… for something. A feeling, maybe. 

You have no idea if he finds what he is looking for.

“Why don’t you understand? You need me!” He yells, flecks of his blood jumping from his mouth to yours, so close his face is. “I’m the answer to your life’s question. Without me, you’re just a joke--without a punchline!”

His eyes--there’s no recognition in them now. No clarity. He’s scared, he’s lost his facilities, and you dimly recognize it’s at least partially your fault. You are the one who pushed him so far. For all that you wanted to befriend the Jeremiah he could have been, for all that you still desperately want to help him get back there, you are the one hurtling dangerously near and nearer to making him snap.

_ This is all for you, Bruce. _

You opt not to reply with words, but a fist to the jaw. 

This is simply so you can get your ground back, obviously, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with your suddenly tumultuous, conflicting feelings toward him. Taking that out with violence would just be cruel. For good measure, you drive a punch into his abdomen, too, and you can’t even bring yourself to feel particularly sorry for that one, not when he left you sore and gagging in exactly the same way only seconds prior to your retaliation. He tries, as you’ve been trying, not to concede any space to the hit, but he takes it too hard, too unprepared, and stumbles backward. Tries to catch himself--can’t.

Jeremiah falls heavily, backward, onto the gangplank, and when he looks up at you, you are terrified by the fact that you feel something for him, and it’s not hatred, no, not at all.

He looks up at you, and as he’s trying to right himself, he looks--frightened? Not exactly. Not in the way that a man looking up at an opponent with an upper hand like yours should. More… desperate. Miserable. You try to keep him down, delivering a kick to the side that even you wince at  _ (only _ you, actually; it’s like he’s too far gone to even feel it, which is, uh,  _ terrifying, _ in its own right), but even as he collapses back against the cold metal, he’s already pushing himself back up again, ready to take another hit. Jeremiah looks at you, and his eyes are uncomprehending. He  _ doesn’t know _ why you’re hurting him like this. You want to say he looks confused, but that’s not quite right--in reality, Jeremiah looks up at you like you’ve  _ betrayed _ him.

“Bruce, please,” he says. 

It’s hard to put together exactly what happens next. Something snaps inside you, that’s first. Whatever straight (as in, uncomplicated, and not… well) feeling--whatever  _ connection _ you had felt in that one overwhelming second you’d give your fortune to forget about--fades to the background, and is eagerly replaced by anger.  _ Rage. _ You have no idea why you are so angry, but you welcome it; once again, he could be anyone. You are a basin brimming with problems and fears and uncomfortable disparities, and he is nothing but an outlet. A crack in the dam. 

You overflow.

It begins with you grabbing him by the front of his suit jacket and hauling him roughly to his feet. Before he’s even really standing, though, you’re throwing a punch that knocks him down again, watching yourself as if you were a separate entity as you do so, wondering at your cruelty. You nearly pause, wanting desperately to tell him you’re sorry… and then you grab his collar. Force him to stand.

Rinse.

Repeat.

“Please, what?” You hiss, your teeth bared, feeling about as insane as he looks. “Please, be my  _ friend, _ Bruce? Don’t _ kill  _ me?” You drop the both of you in such a way that you’re kneeling on his midsection again, one knee jammed so hard into his gut that you’re surprised that he really  _ doesn’t _ puke. Before he can react to any of this (if he was going to in the first place; it’s uncanny how unresponsive he is, and you don’t like it in the least), you seize a handful of his hair in your hand with enough force to  _ elicit _ a response, a whine that you will adamantly swear you read as a sign of his pain and absolutely nothing else, no matter how much the blood that rushes south in the immediate aftermath might disagree with you. Holding his face still to thwart any attempts he’s not making to retreat, you hit him again.

“You. Shot. Selina.”

_ That  _ gets a reaction. For every second of the fight so far, he’s been amiable enough to you. Let you hit him. Wanted you. Even when you provoked him into fighting back, the action was half-hearted and desperate. When you say her name, though, his whole face changes, and you see, for the first time, genuine hatred on Jeremiah’s features. If you thought he was angry before,  _ well. _

“Selina, Selina. I had to Bruce, don’t you see? She was standing between us.”

He struggles, now, struggles to get free. With Jeremiah putting up a fight, you have to mentally reevaluate how much stronger than him you are--it’s taking everything you have to keep him from turning the tables, and even with that effort, you aren’t sure how much longer you’re going to be able to maintain your advantage. 

Shit.

“She’s my friend! Do you think--do you really think that hurting her will make me love you? You’re insane, Jeremiah. And I don’t--I’ll  _ never _ love you.”

He pauses for a second as his face betrays the heart you’ve broken in two--but it doesn’t stop him for long. You’ve only made him angrier, in fact, and if it’s true you shattered his heart, then you see quickly that he means to pick up the jagged pieces and use them to slit your throat. This time, when he struggles to flip the two of you, you can’t force him back down. He pins you on your back. You growl--it’s all you have left to do.

Jeremiah straddles you, holding both your wrists over your head and bringing his face within dangerous inches of your own. He has that look in his eyes again--like all is forgiven. Like he desperately wants you to understand.

You don’t. Can’t. Won’t let yourself.

It’s too late to understand now, isn’t it?

“I admit that’s… disappointing. But it’s like I said; I’ve made my peace. You don’t want to acknowledge our connection through love. That’s fine.” He lets go of your right wrist for just long enough to throw a punch at your cheek that has you swallowing your own blood. “But you  _ won’t _ feel nothing toward me.” This time, when he hits you, it’s with his open palm, and it stings. You’ve been bloodied, beaten, cut, stapled. You’ve broken bones before. You’ve even been very nearly used as ritual sacrifice, and as a result of all of this, your pain tolerance is abnormal. When something hurts, it  _ hurts, _ and loathe though you are to admit it, there’s a part of you… well, there have been times, just a couple of times, really, when the thrill of the fight has gone so far to affect you that you find you actually like it, the pain. The brutalizing of your own flesh and bones. 

You suppose that’s why you have to bite back a moan when he slaps you. There’s not a doubt in your mind that Jeremiah hears your shame (just as you heard his, that whine he did  _ not _ try to contain just a few minutes ago); he shifts his hips closer to yours as it happens, twitching like he’s barely restraining himself from losing control entirely and just grinding down into you for everything he’s worth. You do not think about what your response might be if he did.

Not at all, not at all.

“If your hatred is all I can get, Bruce,” he says, bringing his fist back again, “then I’ll take it.”

He hits you so hard your vision goes blurry.

Enough is enough. 

You let yourself go completely limp, as he had. He must be a kinder person than you (wait, what?), because the second you stop fighting back, he drops any pretense of wanting to hurt you; rather, he loosens his punishing grip on your wrists, and in an instant his touch goes from cruel to caring--like he’s worried he’s  _ broken _ you. 

You try not to dwell on the implications.

“Bruce?” he asks. His voice is worried, and you have to fight to keep your features blank, because in that moment, he doesn’t sound like the Jeremiah you’ve been fighting. He sounds like the Jeremiah from before, the one who blushed when you complimented his mind. The soft, sweet Jeremiah you met in the bunker; the Jeremiah who really could have been your...  _ friend. _

He grabs your face, but not with the vice grip you had used to keep him still enough to hit. Checks your pulse, and that you’re breathing. Something in him relaxes once he’s confirmed this, but he’s still tense--upset, maybe. Concerned. 

“Bruce, darling,” he tries again, this time with his ridiculous accent back in place, which strikes you as more of a relief than it should be. “I’m really very sorry, I didn’t mean to--”

You choose this moment, Jeremiah with his guard down and babbling pathetically, to bring your head up  _ hard _ to knock into him, using the momentum of the swing to pull yourself to your feet. He reels, his eyes rolling in a way that does nothing to mitigate the mad dog look he’s got about him, but before you can get a good angle with which to knock into him again, he throws himself at you, his body crowding you,  _ forcing _ you against the gangplank’s flimsy guard rail and while his crazy eyes search your face, he bares his mouth until it’s pulled back into a smile… or a cheap imitation of one, at least. You struggle, and with every motion, the gate at your back gives way just a little bit more, which should concern you, concern you a lot, but you’re too preoccupied to notice.

“I don’t love you, Jeremiah. I won’t be your friend. I won’t even hate you.” You’re growling through teeth bared like his, snarling and spitting because you can’t get your message across with your fists. “Get it through your head.  _ I don’t care about you.” _

His manic expression cracks along its edges and breaks out into one of unforgivable hurt. If such a thing were still possible, you think he would be flushed red with exertion and his anger, but as it is, his face remains deathly white, the pale tone all the more alarming as it contorts into a mask of utter malice. He slams you violently back and back into the railing (the railing which creaks and protests every time you land against it with your body’s full weight), and for the first time in the duration of your acquaintance, you begin to think that Jeremiah is actually going to kill you. You are not sure how much you like this development.

“Shut up, shut up,  _ shut up!” _ He looks at you with eyes leaking tears now. You wish you hadn’t seen that, wish even more that your first instinct hadn’t been to jerk a restrained hand up to his face and wipe them away. “You’re the only thing I have, Bruce. All I care about.” His eyes, frightened again, search yours. Searching, searching. You’re pretty sure that the eyes that meet them are void of what he’s looking for, and take some small satisfaction in that.

You’re wrong, but he’s too far gone to notice, anyway.

“Everything I did--the bombs, your p-parents--it was for you. I don’t--” his face contorts, inner turmoil creating a nervous tick around his eyes, his mouth. His lip trembles.  “I don’t understand why you don’t like me.”

He doesn’t. Right there, back against the rail, already falling in very slow motion, you search his eyes like he does yours, and you know he’s telling the truth; this whole time, all he’s wanted was to make you see him. He’s not out for money, or power, or even chaos. All he wants is  _ you. _

This revelation shakes you just enough to cut off your renewed growl in its tracks. For a moment, you come within a dangerous proximity of the thought that something is going to change, that he might let you help him after all. You find that you desperately, sincerely want to help him, and there’s something dierly important you want to say to this end, but before you can so much as open your mouth, the guard rail at your back breaks, and you are gone.

For a split second, you’re in freefall. You’re convinced Jeremiah has let go of you, because that would be all he had to do to catch his own balance, wouldn’t it, and you think you’re going to die. You think you’re going to die alone, you’re nearly sure of it, until you feel the tight grip of his fists still balled in your coat (the only sensation that emerges out of the sea of boiling panic in your brain), and correct yourself--you are going to die, yes, but not alone. You are going to die in the arms of Jeremiah Valeska. Somehow, the thought is comforting. 

Besides, it makes far more sense, doesn’t it? Now that you think about it, going out like this was probably his back-up plan all along; if he can’t have you in life, you’ll just have to be together in death, just like you thought, just like you saw, and the final step of your waltz comes sooner than you’d hoped, but it comes nonetheless, and now--

Now, you squeeze your eyes shut against the impact, and perhaps this is why it takes you several seconds longer than it should to realize that you are not dead, or engulfed in acid. In fact, you are quite fine, your feet are on solid ground below you, and once you convince your lungs to renew the respiratory process, you suck in the stale, malodorous air of the factory, and it tastes like rebirth. You’re alive. You’re okay.

You’re… pressed chest to chest with Jeremiah Valeska, who is still holding onto your lapels with trembling hands.

_ Oh. _

You’ve heard it said that electrocution is of dangers twofold: sure, the initial shock might stop your heart, but what’s  _ really _ lethal is the pesky tendency of your muscles to spasm as a current goes through them--you clamp down on the live wire, and then you’re stuck, helpless, as you fry from the outside in. When you open your eyes, Jeremiah looks back at you, and he’s helpless. His face is blank, his whole body is shaking, and the muscles in his hands are gripping your jacket like he can’t let go. That obvious revelation you had before, that you keep having, really, hits you again: his distress is a product of many factors, but most immediately, the panic in his eyes is your fault. You are 2000 volts of electricity right to his nervous system, and he is going to stand here until he fries.

You have no idea what to do with this notion.

You do not want him to fry.

Gently, as gently as you can manage, you inch your hands up until they’re wrapped featherlight around his wrists, and it is only once you’ve tried to squeeze them reassuringly that you pull. You do not want to hurt him; all you want to do is cut off the current in its tracks. 

_ Save him, _ your mind supplies treacherously.  _ You want to save him.  _

Technically, you can’t argue with that. 

He does nothing as you pry his frozen fingers from your lapels. He does nothing but look at you, as uncomprehending as those blank slates at the Manor who were not your parents, and you can’t even find it in yourself to blame him for it all. He’s a monster, you remind yourself. He brought your city,  _ Gotham City, _ to its knees, and you know, you remember, you’ve felt the effects as much as anyone else, but. 

But.

But here you are, and here he is, and he is looking at you like you were the one who saved  _ his _ life and not the other way around. You pull him away from the ledge. He lets you. Gaining courage, you let yourself raise a hand (slowly, steadily, carefully, and it’s still not enough) to his face. This… it’s no small move you’re making. The implications might be disastrous, you might be ruining everything Jim, the GCPD, and every good person left in Gotham has been fighting for since the bridges burned, but don’t you owe it to him, to the person that he was and could still be, to  _ try?  _ To do  _ something? _

You ghost your thumb over the sharp cut of his jaw and breathe his name like God spoke it to you. You hardly touch him, but your breathing increases rapidly, because through that tiny brush, you feel the electric shock that you left dancing in his veins as it jumps from his skin to yours, and that buzz just about stops your heart.

“Jeremiah.…”

He blinks once, twice, and then seems to regain his consciousness. When he sees you, to your shock (and perhaps to his, too), he _ sneers. _

“Oh, please,” he says, shoving you away. “Don’t put on a show for my sake now, Bruce. We both know that didn’t truly change anything.”

He’s angry. You try to understand.

“No, listen, I--”

Being that you have no idea what you would have said had you been allowed to continue, your mouth running traitorously faster than your brain, it’s probably a good thing when he lashes out and pops you across the mouth before you can finish the thought. You will not thank him for this, however.

Your lip is split now, like his. You bend double for just a moment, then straighten up, trying to ineffectually stem the bleeding with your hand and guard your vitals at the same time. When you rise, you find that he is once again looking at you with murderous intent.

You feel like you are on a rollercoaster, and have no idea how to get off.

“I only wanted to mean something to you, Bruce. Because we’re friends. Because I love you.” He shakes, still, but it’s not shock (electric or otherwise) this time. It’s rage. Somehow, your soft touch hurt him more than all the cheap shots you’d taken at him ever could, and doesn’t that just figure? “And you rejected that. You rejected my gift after I worked  _ so hard _ putting it together for you.”

He advances on you, and, given the proximity you’d already shared, you’re forced to take a step back. You do not raise a hand.

“I let you hit me. I let you  _ hurt _ me. You said you didn’t care, but I thought--this is it. We were really starting to become bonded, if only by hatred. Given time, you would have learned how much I meant to you and it would have been enough!”

His face contorts, but it’s not even anger now. Or, it is, but not just that--he’s crying again. 

Fuck.

“But all it takes for you to withhold your hatred is my pulling you back from the edge? That’s not right! That’s not fair! You’re supposed to hate me!”

_ “I don’t hate you!”  _ you yell. You do not tell him he means nothing to you, but Jeremiah does an admirable job of reading that in himself. He makes to hit you again. This time, you dodge his fist, and he screams his anger.

_ “Why? _ I accepted you would never admit your love for me, I accepted your hate would be enough, but I  _ cannot accept your vapid indifference! _ Why won’t you hate me!”

You take a step toward him, hands out in front of you, like you’re trying to soothe some agitated wild thing. It’s not that much of a stretch. 

“Jeremiah, you’re sick. You need help. Let me--”

“No!” It’s the final straw. Jeremiah lunges for you, grabs your hair, and brings his knee up so hard against your face that you’re sure you hear a crack. In pain, you lash out blindly, driving  _ your _ knee up into his crotch, which is a dirty move, you’ll admit, but it grants you the space you need to get free, and you can’t quite think of anyone who would fault you. He’s leaning hard on one of the remaining guardrails (because that worked out so well the last time), and this gives you room to press your hand against the new blood joining that which congealed on your chin from your lip. Which way are you supposed to lean your head if you have a nosebleed? It doesn’t matter--he comes at you again, you connect an elbow to his gut, and he sucks in his next breath like you knocked absolutely everything else from his lungs.

He’s… laughing. He wanted you to do that; of course he did. This is the only way you can communicate.

Fine. If he needs to believe you hate him, then you can play his game until he is subdued. Once you pin him down, it’ll be a simple matter of slapping some sense into him, and after that, maybe you can even get him to listen to you. 

You have to get him to listen to you. 

In the name of diplomacy, you drive your fist, very hard, into Jeremiah’s eye socket. For the first time tonight, the hit does not feel like a lie--you are not hiding some uncomfortable sadism you’d rather distance yourself from behind a thin veil of self-righteous justice. Jeremiah’s presence in this fight is no longer an unimportant coincidence. It’s much simpler, and the realization feels like freedom--you mean to hit him, now, and you do.

It’s good. 

He reels back in pain, but even as he does so, hand involuntarily reaching up to clutch at the damage, he’s grinning, and, you realize incredulously, it’s infectious.

You’re honest to God standing here with Jeremiah Valeska, the man who knocked your whole city off the map, clutching your wounds and  _ laughing.  _

He goes for you again, and you let him get closer than you normally would before throwing up a block against the blow he aims. Now that you’ve come to the batshit crazy realization that you’re enjoying yourself, it becomes less a desperate fight for your life, and more a game, like back when you used to spar against Alfred or Selina. Applying those memories to this moment doesn’t hurt like it might. Instead, your mood lightens, and you allow yourself to become loose and casual in your movements. You’re teasing him.

You’re having  _ fun. _

Jeremiah’s lips curl into a peaceful smile, as if he’s finally fitted himself into the place he wanted to be all along, and he throws a punch that you mostly avoid. It connects to your shoulder instead of your chest, but by the time you’ve borne it, you’re in the perfect position to headbutt him, hard, in  _ his _ chest, which you do, knocking him backward. You’re exhausted, you’re in pain, and you’re laughing, really laughing, for the first time since the bridges blew, or maybe longer--and maybe that’s why, when Jeremiah looks up at you even as he’s stumbling backward, hand grasping for purchase so that he can steady himself against the momentum you’ve given him, you meet his smile, and stand, boxerstance, playing more than fighting now, and think that everything’s going to be alright.

Through his giggles--more genuine now than they’d been in the kitchen, you think--you get the impression that Jeremiah’s thinking something similar, and you think he might even say so, because he’s opening his mouth, and

“Oh.”

Is all he gets out before he realizes, and you realize, at once, that he’s gone to grab for a rail that isn’t there. You lock his eyes for just one infinitesimal length of time (it’s hardly more than a fraction of a second, so why does it feel like you’re stuck in that moment for an eternity?), and you’re already lunging forward, but it’s too late--you land hard on the gangplank where he was a moment ago, the wind knocked clean from your lungs, and when you grasp blindly over the side, your hand misses his by not so much as an inch.

Jeremiah Valeska falls into a vat of acid.

It does not mean nothing to you.

You’re yelling before he even hits the surface.  _ “Jeremiah!” _ does not stop his descent, or change the bubbling toxic muck the two of you have been fighting over into a harmless pool of water. You see something in his eyes the moment before his body goes under--it’s not fear now, more like… regret? an apology? And then he’s gone.

Jeremiah goes under the surface of that vat of waste. 

He does not reemerge.

As soon as you are able, you push yourself to your feet, gasping for breath, and waste far, far too much time waiting for something--what? for him to break the surface of the liquid like everything is okay? In your head, you’re screaming at yourself to  _ move, goddamn it,  _ and for one dangerous pause, that nearly translates to you jumping in after him yourself.

You’re running on empty. After spending too many precious seconds on nothing more useful than vaguely suicidal tendencies, you finally break into a sprint toward those stairs you’d been so desperate to avoid back when they had meant losing ground (and oh, if you had only retreated then, Jeremiah would be dry and safe now, and you will be sick if you allow yourself dwell on that) and hurtle yourself down them. You take them two at a time, and it’s still not enough. He’s dying. He’s dying, and it’s your fault, and you can’t help him.

That feeling you had earlier (that overwhelming  _ moment _ where you looked into Jeremiah’s eyes and when he asked you if you could feel a connection, you could, you really, truly could) is back, except this time, it’s drawing you to the vat of chemicals, and if you can’t get him out of there, it threatens to drown you just the same. At the lip of the vat, you hesitate for exactly as long as it takes you to lose your overcoat and push up your sleeves (as if that will help), and then you’re scrambling up the ladder on its side, babbling unintelligibly in a way that’s intended more for your own comfort than for his.

“Jeremiah! Jeremiah, I’m going to get you out, just hang on.” You don’t know why you’re saying this; can’t tell if he’s able to hear you or if he’s still even alive. You’re doing a lot of nonsensical things, actually. It doesn’t matter.

He doesn’t fight his way to the surface, and you’re running out of time. You search the bubbling facade of Jeremiah’s toxic grave (don’t say that), and, as it reveals nothing, you make a decision anyway and plunge both your arms under its surface.

What follows is the most excruciating pain you’ve ever felt. Nothing could have prepared you for what awaits in the acid; Jim told you before that the gas emitted from a tiny vial of this stuff had been enough to kill five men, and as you force your arms deeper into it, you believe every word of that statement. Already, your mind screams at you to pull back, to surface, to clean yourself off or else amputate the limbs entirely, and it has only been seconds for you. Jeremiah has been under longer, and it’s not just his arms but his whole body. Your head swims, and the only solid thought you can hold in it is the conviction that whatever he’s done, whoever he is, nobody deserves to feel  _ anything _ like this.

Your self-preservation instincts are on the verge of winning out against your willpower, and you are painfully aware of it. Every nerve ending in your arm (nerve endings which you will later be informed underwent massive and likely irreparable damage) sings your pain, horrible pain, nothing like the blunt, addictive brutality of fists against flesh, and you are very nearly on the verge of giving up, or maybe pitching yourself forward just to  _ end it, _ when your hand finally catches something. You can barely feel anything outside of the bite and corrosion of acid  _ eating away your fucking arms, _ but you think it might be fabric--yes, you’re sure now. You are grasping at the arm of Jeremiah’s coat jacket.

You could weep.

Biting the inside of your cheek hard enough that you taste liquid iron, you latch onto that arm with everything you’ve got left (it’s not a lot) and you pull. To get enough leverage to drag one completely unresponsive and inordinately heavy Valeska out of the tank, you have to jerk so far backward that you nearly lose footing on the vat’s shitty metal ladder yourself, and  _ that’s _ a nightmare scenario--if your arms leave that vat of acid without Jeremiah in them, there is no godly way you are going to be able to force them under again. Just in time, though, you catch your balance. It’s okay. You’re… well, not okay, but you haven’t fallen, either, and in times like these, you have to count your blessings, so. Biting back the  _ overwhelming _ desire to scream, you reposition your grip so that you have one hand (both of them fighting strenuously against the strict commands you’re sending, the bastards) under each of his armpits, and then you’re pulling him over the lip, and out, and that’s it--you have no energy left, none whatsoever, and so the downward trip is not so much a descent down the ladder but a good-old-fashioned fall. You might cry out, but after an acid bath, the heavy  _ thunk _ of the impact doesn’t have a chance in hell to break you--indeed, out of the many thousands of injuries you will sustain over the course of your life, it will be the very odd one that  _ does. _

A regrettable inevitability of your pulling maneuver is that you end up with acid on more than just your arms. Jeremiah lands sopping wet more or less on top of you, and so your chest and legs, too, get a liberal dousing in the devil’s piss as what you can only assume is a parting  _ fuck you _ from the tank. 

Which is great. 

For a moment, it’s all you can do to lie there on your back underneath Jeremiah again (and how different from the last time!), body pushed past the point of fatigue, past the point of exhaustion, and directly into paralysis. Regaining dominance over your dead limbs and unwilling muscles is a process far more arduous than you have ever gone through, have ever even  _ anticipated _ going through--not until you lose them do you recognize the glorious blessings inherent in a body that obeys your commands easily and without struggle. Every single action you take is an exercise in shoving together two magnets’ like ends--you fight an uphill battle as you strip your shirt to keep the acid from your skin, using the dry parts of it and your wayward overcoat to blot acid from Jeremiah and then yourself. As you painstakingly remove first his jacket, and then his shirt, too, on the same principle as you had removed your own, you do so not as a unified front, body and mind in beautiful harmony, but as an unholy combination of unskilled puppet master and tangled marionette--with your mind, you try to guide yourself smoothly through the necessary developments of the next few minutes, but every motion comes out jerky and false. 

Aristotle called the soul a two part hierarchy in which the rational mind keeps one’s base desires in check. If the virtue of your  _ rational mind _ is what enables you to keep pushing while every single inch of your body screams for you to  _ stop, _ you think you should have stuck to Plato.

You dry off all the skin you can reach (your own and Jeremiah’s) to the best of your ability, but there’s only so much the overcoat can absorb--the result is better, clearly, than where you started, but you can still feel the acid’s bite on every surface it so much as brushed, and you are not okay. 

You cannot imagine the way Jeremiah feels right now, if he is feeling anything at all.

Spread eagle and mostly naked (you remove your pants next and then his, opening a mortifying can of worms in the process, but now is not the time for modesty and besides, your boner has long since fallen victim to the supreme unsexiness of two arms full of acid, anyway), Jeremiah looks dead for all the world, and in the first few minutes after his impromptu baptism, you’re sure you’d been too late. Slowly, though, your hands cooperate with you enough to find a pulse, and, wonder of wonders, he seems not to have ingested too horrible a quantity of the stuff, because not so long after  _ that, _ his breathing audibly resumes, and you can finally let yourself rest.

Outside of the breathing, yours and his, both efforts sounding laborious and weak even to your own ears, it is quiet for a long time. And then: a change. One of Jeremiah’s rattling breaths cuts off into a wracking cough. It alarms you, actually, and for a second, you fear the worst, but when you roll onto your side to monitor his state with as much urgency as  _ your _ sorry state allows, it is immediately obvious that he’s awake.

You’re not sure how much he can see, or hear. Feel. When you speak, you do so softly. 

“Jeremiah?”

“Bruce…” It’s a croak, a whisper so low you’re not entirely convinced you didn’t imagine it. His face is covered in gruesome chemical burns (much like your easy mobility, you aren’t sure you appreciated how very  _ pretty _ you’d found Jeremiah before you’d seen all of his pretty, pretty features horribly disfigured by an acid bath), and so when he tries to smile at you, it makes every line of his face twist in pain, and that, you  _ didn’t _ imagine. His eyes are opened, but they’re a sea of red around cloudy pupils, and you’re certain he can’t see you. The thought sends pangs in your chest. “You saved my life.”

It hits you like a fist to the gut; you pulled him out of the acid, yes, but only after being the reason he fell in in the first place. The acid burns on your wrists and forearms, not to mention the patchier ones on your chest and legs, cry out to remind you that you hadn’t gotten off so easily yourself, but you’re not the one looking around the room blankly through blind eyes, either. You’re ashamed, but telling him so won’t do anything now.

Gently as you can manage, you take his right hand in one of yours, and cradle it delicately. You can’t move your fingers enough to intertwine them with his, but that’s okay; this much contact is already putting you in enough pain that the edges of your vision go black. Any more might actually kill you, and who  _ knows _ what it’s doing to him. He doesn’t stop you from taking the hand, though, or give any indication that you’ve increased  _ his _ net pain as you have yours, and so you do not let go.

“Yeah,” you say finally. “I did.”

He smiles again. You are convinced that he must be in  _ excruciating _ pain, every movement an exercise in his will, but if he is, and if they are, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he seems to go right back to that moment before he fell, delighted to spend time in your presence, a soft smile telling you that he’s finally getting what he wants. Even after everything he’s done, and knowing exactly who Jeremiah is, you wonder inwardly if you really deserve the power to be the cause of that much happiness. 

He’s quiet for a moment, and so you take it upon yourself to fill the gap. “I don’t want you dead, Jeremiah. A horrible thing has happened to you, and you’re sick. But it’s not too late. I want to help you.”

He lets out a flat  _ ha ha ha _ that hardly qualifies as a laugh, somehow managing to tighten the ruined muscles of his hand around yours in accordance with it. That wide Stepford smile is still plastered carefully onto his features for the split second duration of the squeeze, but it’s a lie; immediately after he’s done it, Jeremiah hisses in pain and frees your grip as if it burned him, which, you think, it probably had. It’s the first indication Jeremiah’s given you that he  _ isn’t _ completely numb to the extensive damage he’s sustained, and you wince--doesn’t that just make everything so much worse?

You hate to admit it, but you’re not a small bit relieved for the loss of contact either.

“You’re--naive, sweetheart.” His voice has been changed by the drink, although you’re not quite sure if that’s due to the chemical’s actual effects or the strain of his extreme discomfort. Maybe, you think, he’s just not concentrating hard enough to keep up the false inflection he’d been affecting before. What had that been all about, anyway? “Always seeing the best in people.”

“Jeremiah, I knew you before… before all this. You were a brilliant inventor, an architect. It’s not too late for you to get back there.  _ I could help you.” _

He shakes his head, and raises the hand you’d been holding about halfway to your face, as if to cradle it, before the weakness in his body overcomes his intent and the arm flops ineffectually back to his chest. He’s breathing hard from that small exertion, and from the pain in general, you suppose. You can’t imagine his pain. Even so, there’s a small, fond smile that makes your heart ache on his face when he speaks:

“I… I’m afraid not, Bruce. You must understand--what you’re proposing, it’s everything… everything I  _ want. _ What I’ve wanted from the first time I laid eyes on you.” He smiles again, and his blind eyes, staring at the ceiling, seem to betray his sadness. In your own eyes, you feel tears prick the corners. You do nothing to wipe them away as they start pouring down your face. “But it’s too late for absolution now, love. Far too late. The person I was before--I couldn’t even begin to go back.”

You understand, more intimately than you’d like to. It’s the reason Jeremiah’s ploy at the manor hadn’t worked; even if those people had been exactly who they were supposed to be and not an illusion of hypnotism and plastic surgery, you are too far removed from the boy who accidentally led his parents down an alley and to their deaths to be affected now as you once had been. You still… love them, of course you do, and you miss them, but you’re more a product of the last five years without them now than the thirteen you spent under their care. Alfred, Jim, Selina--these people are your family. Life does not rerun; you cannot go back, and neither can Jeremiah. But…. 

“You don’t have to go back. You could move forward. Heal.”

He wasn’t looking at you before (couldn’t have been; wasn’t looking at anything), but now he turns his head to the side as if to avoid your gaze. As he does so, you see tears slide across his nose and onto the concrete, and become vaguely aware of the fact that you, too, are still crying.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

You have no response to this, and he has nothing else to say, so you fall into silence again, the screeching pain in your arms still fighting for your attention, each labored breath Jeremiah takes worrying a little on your consciousness. You think you might sit this way all night, until someone else intervenes in your system and restores its inertia (an object in motion will stay in motion... and all that), perhaps, or else until entropy finally takes its due and claims him, or you, or both, and leaves nothing but a puddle of potent acid and a pile of soaked, ruined clothes. Spontaneous combustion and/or divine intervention starts to look like quite an attractive option, actually, but somewhere in that little window before God decides to step in and after what might be hours, or perhaps only a handful of minutes, Jeremiah speaks, instead.

“Bruce… can you tell me a joke?”

His voice does not rise above a whisper as he offers his meek request, like he expects you to reject him out of hand and wants to soften the blow to himself before it lands. It’s bizarre (the delivery and the appeal, both), and there’s something so unfunny about the situation you’re in that you forget everything funny that’s ever happened, but at the same time, you can’t deny him now. You gulp, sniff, nod.

You are still crying.

“Okay. Okay.” You breathe in and out, choke through a quick sob you can’t bite back, and then steel yourself. This should not be difficult. 

It is so, so hard. 

“There are two men, locked in an asylum.” You wonder as soon as you start if this choice of joke will offend him, if he’ll see it as a dig. He doesn’t seem to, you think, although perhaps you’re only inept at reading him. It’s not supposed to be a dig--as you consider the joke, you know that if he’s supposed to be one of the men, you suppose you’re meant to be the other. It’s moot, at any rate; this is legitimately the only joke you can recall. Because this is true, and because you have to, you continue. “They’ve been mistreated by the staff, and so one night, they decide that enough is enough. They’re going to escape.”

Jeremiah makes a humming noise, spurring you along. You feel yourself losing steam, but by now, you’ve more than made an art of continuing long past the bounds of your dwindling energy supply, and so you go on. There’s nothing else left for you to do.

“They make it up to the roof. All that separates them from freedom is a narrow gap between the buildings--all they have to do is jump.” You grimace. “The first of the men makes it across very quickly. He just jumps. He’s  _ free.” _ You shake your head. “But his friend can’t follow. He’s afraid. Afraid that he won’t make it. Afraid that he will fall.”

“Oh, my,” Jeremiah murmurs. 

“But the first man doesn’t want to leave--to leave his friend. So he says, ‘Hey! I have my flashlight with me. I’ll shine it across the gap between the buildings, and you can walk across the beam and join me!’” Without noticing, your body has started to shake in a way that actually doesn’t have anything to do with the pain you’re in. You’re speaking faster now, regaining the steam that you let dissipate before. For reasons you don’t entirely understand yet, you have to finish this joke. “The second man doesn’t like this plan, though. He shakes his head, and says ‘What do you think I am, crazy? You’d turn it off when I was  _ half way across.’” _

As you finish the joke, you feel the corners of your lips pull downward, your lower lip threatening to wobble in a way it hasn’t since you were fourteen years old. You might even break out into actual hysterics, except Jeremiah on the floor beside you  _ snorts, _ and that’s all the catalyst it takes--in a moment, the two of you are laughing hysterically, his flat, damaged  _ ha has _ combining with a noise you’re making that sounds more like a scream than a proper laugh. You sit next to him, and laugh and laugh until you’re sure you’ve lost your mind. The joke doesn’t warrant the laughter--but you realize with a sudden clarity that it’s not what caused it, either. You laugh until you’re afraid you’ll throw up. Until you can’t laugh anymore.

You laugh until Jeremiah’s laughter dies out beside you, and you fear, really fear, for a moment you might live in forever, that you’ve killed him. A quick check of his pulse tells you you haven’t--probably, the movement and exertion of the laughter, on top of everything else, just sapped whatever strength he’d been using to keep himself passably conscious. You wonder, shamefully, if he’d been doing that on your account, and find you know the answer. Of course you do. 

Of course he was.

Jeremiah is still here, still alive (neither of these facts being any small miracle), but without the mercy of his ruined voice and flat laugh keeping you company, he leaves you startlingly and painfully alone. It is only around this point that it begins to occur to you that you had been wrong--you  _ do _ need Jeremiah Valeska, and like so many other things, you only recognized it once you lost him. You’re miserable.

And you’re  _ cold. _

There had been no time in the aftermath of the fall for any sensation outside of the roar of adrenaline in your ears and the ohmygodcutmyarmsoffpleaseimbeggingyou  _ pain, _ both of which faded to the background in turn when Jeremiah woke up and became your whole world. 

There’s no buffer now.

Suddenly and unforgivably aware of the factory’s chill, you curl in on yourself and your bare flesh, hugging your knees to your chest like a child as your forehead presses against them hard and you cry. The remnants of your tears track down your calves and to your ankles, puddling in the now-diluted dregs of the acid solution that, huh, you should really move out of. You watch. That is all you do. You watch, and you sit, dwarfed by the cavernous reaches of the factory, which does not care about you or Jeremiah or anyone else who might take up space between its walls. It’s like Gotham in that respect. The night your parents died, you sat on dirty streets cloaked by distant streetlights and smog, and you knew, for the first time, how very little you meant to the world. To the city. To  _ your  _ city. That feeling has plagued you ever since, but the meantime has given you five long years to grow used to it, perhaps to even learn how to be comforted by it--but not tonight. Tonight, you feel very young, very small, and implicitly powerless, and it is because of this that you know Jeremiah’s plan succeeded after all. For the first time in five years, you are transported fully back to that night and you sit, doubled over, crying next to the mangled body of someone you love. There is nothing left to do but to wait for Jim Gordon. 

You have no idea how long it is before he arrives.

 

He’s alone when he charges the warehouse; ever the one man calvary. You hear him shouting for you before you see him, but when he comes into view, Jim is exactly as you’d pictured him: his guns are blazing, his suit is ruffled, and the look on his face is exhausted, but assured. He’s in his element. You almost smile.

He sees you on the ground, chemical burns deforming your arms, tears streaking your face, and, oh, nearly entirely entirely naked, next to a similarly naked and even further deformed Jeremiah Valeska, and his face changes from one of determination, of worry at the most, into a face of near terror. Jim is not cut out for this situation. You want to help him through it, but truth be told, you aren’t cut out for it, either.

“Bruce.” He walks over to you slowly, like he’s scared of causing you further pain. He’s treating you like a porcelain doll, even gentler than he had the night your parents died, because there’s no dead father in his repertoire that could help him relate this situation to himself. He doesn’t try, and you’re grateful for that, you think. “Are you alright? What--”

If the rest of your night is an exercise in lying, this is where it starts. You uncurl yourself from the ground and stand, make your way to him with as little self-consciousness as you can muster. It’s imperative that you appear strong now.

“I’m fine, Jim. Jeremiah and I had a fight. He took a wide hit at me and fell into the tank. Did you manage to foil his plan with the rockets?”

“Yes, but…” He hesitates. There’s something in his eyes that makes you think of Selina at the bar, unforgiving to the memory of a little girl who did everything she could. Jim and Selina aren’t that different; you wonder if they’ve ever noticed and hope, vaguely, that they do. “I had to drive the whole truck into the river. Reunification… it might be quite a long time, now.”

Jim is weary. You all are, but you think he’s been shouldering more of the blame than anyone, which is absurd--he wasn’t even there that night, when it all went to shit and you stood by and watched the bridges fall. Not like you were, at any rate, not a safe distance away, with Ra’s and Jeremiah on either side. He was in Gotham, fighting. Saving people. You want to tell him it’s not his fault, because it’s  _ yours, _ or more specifically, theirs, but it all comes back to that same question: what good would it do?

You place a light hand on Jim’s shoulder, because he needs it.

“You saved thousands of lives tonight.”

He looks at you sadly, but manages to give a tight smile. You try to smile back.

“Is he…?” Jim asks, looking pointedly at Jeremiah’s body. You can tell he wants to ask you about your state, and his presence, but he’s restraining himself, and you’re grateful for that, too. You don’t know what you’re going to tell him when he does.

You shake your head. “Unconscious. He… got himself out of the acid, and used the last of his strength to make a lunge for me. That’s why…”

Both of you look at your arms. Jim seems more than a little alarmed about the whole thing.

“Bruce, you’re hurt. When Lee gets here, you need to let her check that out.”

“I’m fine, Jim.”  _ Liar. _ “It looks worse than it is.”

He regards you dubiously, but before the detective can challenge your statement, the warehouse doors slam open again, and now it’s Selina’s turn to charge the castle.

Jim swears. “I told her to stay with Lee.”

“Bruce!” She runs over to you once she spots you, clear concern in her eyes, and in a moment of rare emotion from her, she seems all but ready to engulf you in a hug… before suddenly stopping short and regarding you with a funny expression. That’s the Selina you know. “Why are you naked?”

“Jeremiah took an acid bath and Bruce got caught in the fallout,” Jim explains, seamlessly accepting your explanation as fact, or at least accepting he isn't going to get a better one. Selina glances down at Jeremiah where he lies twisted on the floor, as if seeing him for the first time.

“Is he dead?”

You shake your head and have to fight the urge to reposition yourself between the two of them, conspicuously using your body as a human shield for Jeremiah’s. You try to remind yourself of Selina as she had been, Selina paralyzed and terrified because  _ she could not move her legs, _ and try to remember that she deserves to take whatever revenge she can get.

You will not let her. You know it is a betrayal.

“No, but he needs serious medical attention. Jim, when Lee gets here…”

Jim looks at you, and there’s an element you can’t read in his eyes. A conversation he’s been dancing around. 

You hate it when he does this kind of thing.

“Jim?” You prompt, because it’s the nicest way to demand that he spit it out. You’ve known him for too long now to abide being treated like a child, regardless of whether or not you are. 

“Bruce… you know what Jeremiah has done. You don’t have to protect him. No one… no one will blame you if he dies.”

You study the ground for a second, but then swallow hard and meet Jim’s eyes in such a way that you hope brokers no argument. “I will. I know Jeremiah has done horrible things, and he deserves to be punished. But he’s sick. He isn’t in control of his own actions. He needs help.”

Jim studies your face for a moment, but finally nods his assent. You think, vaguely, that there is solidarity in his eyes.

When you look at Selina, you expect anger. You do not find this. She’s not happy about your decision, and you can’t ask her to be, but she seems, in some way you can’t quite describe, to  _ get _ it--like she knows what it would do to you (how could she know?) if he were killed now, and for your sake, she’s willing to live in a world in which Jeremiah Valeska is still breathing. She killed him before, after all, and in the end….

You do your best to smile at her. Your heart isn’t in it, but it should be; you truly do appreciate everything she’s done for you tonight more than you have words to express, and when you’re in a better place, you need to sit down with her and tell her how much it all meant to you. How much  _ she _ means to you.

Right now, the bulk of the crisis averted, your arms covered in new scars that, years later, will necessitate a penchant for long sleeves and an intimate familiarity with liquid latex, exhaustion sets in on both an emotional and a physical level, and it’s all you can do to follow lamely as Jim hauls Jeremiah’s prone form into the truck that Harvey eventually shows up in and collapse inside it once you have done so. It is an avoidance technique, and you recognize it as one. Jim gives you his coat, which saves you from the humiliation and tactical disadvantage of wandering the streets of Gotham in your boxers, but even if he hadn’t, you’re not altogether sure that you would care. You’ve been through so much--too much--tonight, and you were already exhausted when it all began.

There’s an outcry when Jeremiah is brought into the tank, and to your shame, you sit by and let Jim handle it. He parrots the story you gave, making it a little more real with every repetition (you wonder how long it will take until your lie becomes the truth, and the real events are the fantasy), changing no details save one: when they ask how Jeremiah got out of the chemicals, he hesitates and takes responsibility. It confuses you at first, a bit, but then you see it--the flash of mistrust in Harvey Bullock’s eyes, the sudden chill between them. Jim saved you from that. You say nothing; not then, not as the drive starts, not as Lee Thompkins quickly bandages your arm and then hustles over Jeremiah’s body, looking perturbed at her task but nonetheless struck with the need to see her patient stabilized. You’re glad to see her working. It keeps your mind off the fact that, because of the very man she’s struggling to help now, she had very nearly become the next in a line of beautiful women adorned with strands of pearls bleeding out in Crime Alley, and if she had, it would have been on account of Jeremiah’s obsession with you.

You don’t--can’t--think about that. No, not at all. Instead, as the truck bounces and rattles through the dilapidated streets of Gotham city, you stare out the window without seeing a thing, and you reflect; Jeremiah had gotten his wish.

Before the factory, before the chemical bath, he had expressed disappointment that a random mugger in an alley was the person you were tied to the closest, _ the man you saw when you closed your eyes.  _ He needn't have worried. Shooting your parents’ dopplegangers, even shooting Jim and Lee, wouldn’t have done the trick (yes, you’re becoming quite sure of that), but taking a nosedive into acid did; you are certainly seeing Jeremiah on the edges of your consciousness now. Jeremiah, standing on the edge of the gangplank, realizing too late that he had reached out and grabbed onto nothing. Jeremiah, falling through the air with an apologetic smile. Jeremiah, burned and scarred and corroded, wincing in pain as he laughs at your joke, limp on the unforgiving concrete floor of Ace Chemicals. He’s only a few feet away, but you can’t bear to look at him, to see him lie like the dead as Lee applies bandages to his face and monitors his breathing. Averting your eyes is futile, of course, but you try your best to let go of it all, and use one last act of your not inconsiderable will to silence the screeching thoughts in your head.

It doesn’t work.

That first night, everyone seems to sense your exhaustion and leave you more or less to yourself. Lee and Jeremiah are dropped off at the hospital with as little fanfare as possible (news that Jeremiah Valeska is, one, alive and two, being treated for life threatening injuries at a civilian hospital being the  _ last _ thing the operation needs right now), and the rest of you are taken back to the GCPD, where Jim offers you a cot and promptly fucks off somewhere else, no doubt looking for a new way to work himself to death in the name of Gotham City. Alfred arrives soon after you do, and he seems more pleased to see Selina than you ever expected to see him. He hugs you, and you let him, sitting with his arms around you for a long time, but eventually he, too, advises you to sleep off the day and try to deal with it in the morning. 

And then you’re alone.

You curl up on the cot, feeling very small, and you don’t sleep, not really. It’s still more rest than you’ve gotten in days, though, knowing now that Alfred is safe, and Selina is safe, and Jim, and Lee Thompkins, and perhaps Jeremiah most of all. You’re grateful for it, and you take advantage for as long as you can.

When you get up again, that’s when the lying starts. 

They’d left you alone last night, but you’ve been adamant that they treat you like an adult, like an equal, and so they do: they ask you to give a full recount of what happened to Jeremiah, and you give it, words and scenes exchanged for those of your own making. You want to feel guilty, as you pick at the bandages on your arms, for lying to your only allies, to men and women you’ve come to regard as friends, as  _ family, _ but you don’t. It’s simply the way things have to be. 

You tell them that Jeremiah wanted you to be his brother, his explicitly platonic  _ friend. _ This is a lie. You tell them that after you took off for Ace Chemicals, the fight was brief; he demanded you feel a connection between the two of you, and when you enraged him by denying it, he pinned you to the safety bar and swung hard. That when Jeremiah Valeska fell into the acid, it meant nothing to you.

They’re lies. Every word that comes out of your mouth, everything you tell them, is a lie. You accept the necessity of this, and no one questions you. 

You deny your part in Jeremiah’s escape from the vat, smoothly substituting the same order of events that Jim supplied for you last night. _ Lie. _

You tell them you wish he had died there, but it wouldn't be right to kill him now.  _ Lie, lie. _

That you feel nothing toward him. 

_ Biggest lie of all. _

When you visit the hospital to check on his condition, you tell Leslie that Jim sent you  _ (lie), _ that she might not wonder from where your concern stems. 

She doesn’t question you, instead accepting the obvious mistruth with the practiced grace of a woman with experience in being lied to. Standing beside Jeremiah, as unconscious now as he had been since the two of you shared that laugh on the concrete floor, she tells you that he’s in a coma, partially medically induced, but he’s very likely going to make it. His brain is functioning at normal levels. Deeper than the skin, the fall did no lasting damage… at least, none that her tests have revealed.

You hope that she is telling the truth.

Standing in that same place by the window, hours later with Selina, you tell her that you’re grateful for everything she did the previous night, that she’s done more than her share of work for you, and that, at least, is the truth. You ruin it, of course; you tell her that he’s powerless, that he’s got no brain activity, because you think she needs to hear it.

When you see her face, you know you were right. She reaches over and holds your hand, and your fingers curling around hers might be the most heinous lie of all.

There is only one person to whom you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in the immediate aftermath of the Ace Chemicals fight. It takes you half a day to find her, half a day you can’t afford to be away from the GCPD, half a day you should spend trying to support Jim’s campaign for reunification. You do not regret the waste of this time. You find her with a bottle of moonshine and a gun in the mouth of Jeremiah’s tunnel, taking a swig of the alcohol, putting the gun up to her temple, and shooting, and then starting the process over again. When you make yourself known, she hurls her full body at you and pins you down, the gun in your mouth, half of the moonshine spilled onto her clothes with the unexpected movement. She pulls the trigger twice before you can convince her to listen, and you find with a hint of resignation that the experience is more thrilling than unpleasant. Of course it is.

“Jeremiah isn’t dead,” you tell her. “And I know where you can find him.”

She sends you on your way with a sloppy smack of lipstick on your cheek, and according to all sources, it is a matter of mere hours before the bare bones of Gotham General report attack by Ecco and her army of Jeremiah acolytes. As per your request, she does not take any lives; the hospital staff is, in truth, more than happy to give him up without a fight. You trust Ecco to take care of him, to nurse him back to health. You tell yourself the chapter is over, and you are relieved. 

_ (Lie.) _

It’s not so long before this news reaches you. When it does, your reaction is a carefully practiced mixture of surprise at what you hear and sincere concern for the staff; you do not ask any more questions than you strictly have to, and nobody, save one, so much as looks at you twice, because your act is good, and your story was better.

And when Jim Gordon pulls you aside at the end of the day to ask in no uncertain terms if you had been the one to alert Ecco to Jeremiah’s condition and location, you simply shake your head.

Not at all, you tell him. No, not at all.

**Author's Note:**

> me in fics about jim gordon: jim has a lot of problems and hurts the people around him, even if he doesn't always mean to, and he needs to spend a lot of time working on those flaws before he can truly be considered redeemed  
> me in fics not about jim gordon: jim is a Perfect Specimen and i Love him and he's a Hero
> 
> if you're wondering about the second person narration, i have neither answers nor apologies for you. 
> 
> oh, and finally: i feel like this concept has probably been done hundreds of times already since the episode aired, but i hope i put an interesting enough twist on it to keep y'all entertained lmao. come talk to me about gotham! i'll love you forever!


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